Afognak Island

Twilight view from Afognak Island beach

My third and hopefully not last trip to Alaska was to work for the Kodiak Regional Aquaculture Association on Afognak Island (near Kodiak). I spent two months living in a small cabin with only one other person, supplies flown in by bush plane. Our job was to maintain a net at the mouth of a stream so that stocked salmon couldn’t swim upriver but instead be fished out. (The salmon couldn’t breed in the stream they were swimming up anyway) We also had to monitor the salmon catch of fishing boats and were often on boats measuring fish, covered in slime with cold hands. There were also days when the net was knocked down by weather and we had to winch it back into place and repair any holes in it from branches, bears etc. Since the net came down, some salmon made it upstream which allowed us to watch a Kodiak Brown Bear (largest subspecies of Brown Bear in the World) fishing in the stream next to our cabin, which you can see in my Youtube video here.